Meet Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the original Mickey Mouse

A legal dispute in the late 1920s forced Walt Disney to abandon his early signature character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Disney rebounded from this setback by morphing many of Oswald’s key features into Mickey Mouse, the iconic figure of his cartoon empire. In 2017 a Disney animator by the name of David Bossert released a book on the subject titled Oswald the Lucky Rabbit: The Search for the Lost Disney Cartoons. The book was read by a Japanese researcher and animation collector who realized he had been in possession of a rare Oswald print for 70 years, one which had been unaccounted for in the historical record. The film print is now being housed at the Kobe Planet Film Archive in Japan, and archivists are optimistic that more of the missing prints will surface in light of the publicity. To read more:https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/missing-disney-cartoon-1928-discovered-japan-180970842/